Editing a podcast is a pretty daunting task, and most newbs don’t know what they want to achieve before starting. Here are a few approaches and tips to start improving your content.
The first step in editing your audio is to trim the tails. This is a duh moment, but shocking how many just hit the little red dot and then post.
To trim the tails, leave about 0.5-1.5 seconds of dead air before your first dialogue. Delete everything else.
Step two, level match your audio. There’s a pretty good chance that you have more than one audio track present. Perhaps you have a music intro (aka bumper), or two speakers. Without having to fully understand audio, a basic approach is to eyeball your waveforms to have a relatively similar average height. While this is the most elementary of approaches, it’s better than having audio that varies in level so much that a listener will certainly turn off your show.
Step three, and the most time consuming is to edit the content.
There are a few thoughts for editing content but the most practiced approaches are: editing disfluencies (uhh, word repetitions, or anything you wouldn’t necessarily write down), and the other is to edit content (boring parts). Again, this is an elementary approach but if progress is the way of the leaders, it’s best to start somewhere.
What are the benefits of editing your audio?
It’s understanding that not everything that you or anyone says is worth the audio real estate. Listeners are selfish – if movies were crap, we’d walk out of the theatre, and many still do. Bad acting is the equivalent of speech disfluencies, in that it’s hard to swallow.
We all know that movie directors work their butts off to get the best take possible, and edit out anything that doesn’t add to the film. Notice I said to delete “anything that doesn’t add”… NOT to Keep “anything that doesn’t hurt.” Most approach editing using the latter method.
Editing is a simple way to separate yourself from the herd.
1. Well Produced “Successful” Shows.
2. Decently produced “Amateur Success”
3. Crap that no one will listen to.
A good place to practice editing is with this blogpost. What sentences/words have I written that are completely pointless?
